of mud and egg-shells and fruit-peelings, round the scaffold where some petty offender was being flogged by the hangman, until the fortunate appearance of a clement cardinal or the rage of the sympathising mob put a stop to the proceedings. Barbarous as we remember the Rome of the Popes, we must imagine it just a hundred times more barbarous, more squalid, picturesque, filthy, and unsafe if we would know what it was a hundred years ago. But in this barbarous Rome there were things more beautiful and wonderful to a young Flemish lady of the eighteenth century than they could possibly be to us, indifferent and much-cultured creatures of the nineteenth century, who know that most art is corrupt and most music trashy. The private galleries of Rome were then in process of formation; pictures which had hung in dwelling-rooms were being assembled in those beautiful gilded and stuccoed saloons, with their out-look on to the cloisters of a court, or the ilex tops or orange espaliers of a garden, filled with the faint splash of the fountains outside, the spectral silvery chiming of musical clocks, where, unconscious of the thousands of beings who would crowd in there armed with guide-books and opera-glasses in the days to come, only stray foreigners were to be met, foreigners who most likely were daintily embroidered and powdered aristocrats from England or Germany, if they were not men like Winckelmann, or Goethe, or Beckford. It was the great day, also, for excavations; the vast majority of antiques which we now see in Rome having been dug up at that period; and among the ilexes of the Ludovisi and Albani gardens, among the laurels and rough grass of the Vatican hill, porticoes were being built, and long galleries and temple-like places, where a whole people of marble might live among the newly-found mosaics and carved altars and vases. Moreover, there was at that time in Rome a thing of which there is now less in Rome than anywhere, perhaps, in the world--a thing for which English and Germans came expressly to Italy: there was music. A large proportion of the best new operas were always brought out in Rome--always four or five new ones in each season; and the young singers from the conservatorios of Naples came to the ecclesiastical city, where no actresses were suffered, to begin their career in the hoop skirts and stomachers, and powdered _toupes_ with which the eighteenth century was wont to conceive the heroines of ancient Greece and Rome. The bride of Charles Edward was herself a tolerable musician, and she had a taste for painting and sculpture which developed into a perfect passion in after life; so, with respect to art, there was plenty to amuse her.